Since the beginning of June, I have been working on researching and locating the holy wells of County Kilkenny. I have more or less identified about 213 of them which are described in sources going back at least 90 years (Schools’ Collection etc). In some cases, it is very difficult to locate them, because their location was only given as “in such and such a townland in that person’s field”, and it is very difficult to find out who owned a field 90 years ago.
In addition to that, I have more recently started an oral history project collecting people’s memories and stories about holy wells, patterns (which is a type of originally religious festival in Ireland where people do or did things in a certain pattern around a sacred site usually on the patron saint’s feast day) and other related things. I’m uploading them to Wikimedia and add transcripts, if you’re interested: Category:Oral history about holy wells in County Kilkenny.
What has that to do with mapping, you may ask. Well, apart from locating these holy wells and holy well sites which are protected monuments (and sometimes still water sources), I’m getting local place names from my interviewees as well. Names of roads, cross roads, field names etc which are also not recorded on any map yet, but are frequently still used by locals or were used in the past, so recording them now will help locate things referred to in older sources. Some of these, like Bóthar Chiaráin (Kieran’s Road after St Kieran) potentially go back 1300 years or so.
I’m also learning about the interesting etymology of house names like “The Awk” (or The Awg, not sure).